Much like with my Lisbon column I’ve been going through my Madrid photos and making a concerted effort to not focus on the large murals by the big name artists and spend more time looking at the smaller more random pieces that I found whilst there.

So with that in mind here is a piece from the underground tunnels of La Tabacalera by Spanish born London based artist Jay Kaes. I didn’t know too much about him before seeing this piece but looking through his Instagram and website he seems to focus mainly on sci-fi themed portrait work.

This surrealism piece falls into that category and I think it’s called either ‘Crisis’ or ‘Opportunity’ from looking online and features a robotic female character plugged into all kinds of wires. One half of her face is missing revealing her inner workings. Or maybe the missing part of the face is to show the effect the wires are having on the character, I’m not really sure.

I really like the placement of the piece as it is set slightly back from the main path so it really seems like the character is held within some sort of machine whilst being experimented on. The character’s stare is also pretty unsettling, it really feels like she is staring right back at me!